Month: October 2020

The tale of Hanford’s success with plutonium manufacture over the decades for the Nagasaki nuke and then onwards for a generation of atomic and hydrogen bombs, “The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age” is a retelling, but a fresh and vital one. So many of the Manhattan Project and Cold War accounts are too complex, too technical, or too biased. Steve Olson, who hails from the east of Washington State, where the vast plutonium factory sprang up, offers an everyperson account that manages to be both accurate and accessible, both sympathetic (often awestruck) and sad. His unique, and most apt, take on the nuclear weapons enterprise is through the chemistry of plutonium: its discovery, mastery, and production. Olson is a cogent, entertaining writer, and he maintains a steady narrative pace. The Apocalypse Factory celebrates and bemoans a chapter of human achievement, and it comes highly recommended.

Built around a solid thriller idea, and unfurled with tremendous energy, “The Guest List” offers a quick read with little ongoing punch. When guests assemble for a bang-up wedding on a storm-struck remote island off the Irish coast, secrets boil over the top and murder eventuates. Told with great panache by Lucy Foley, a writer with promise, the action is related from numerous points of view, and it’s soon clear that barely a single soul is not keeping secrets. The different characters are well delineated, though with surprisingly little depth, the plot is paced out well, and “The Guest List” can be recommended as an engaging one-sitting read. All that said, the whodunnit outcome springs out as a fizzer and the entire exercise is suffused with a James-Patterson-like sheen.

Jonathan Lethem veers all over the literary genre landscape, always has, and he forever runs the risk of alienating his rapt fans. His previous novel, The Feral Detective left me rather nonplussed, so I hoped “The Arrest,” another switchback turn to the dystopia genre, would restore my faith. Fortunately it does, although the first few chapters are genuinely mystifying. The chapters themselves are short snippets, sometimes only a page long, and the book’s central character, Sandy Duplessis, is a scatty, mild mess, hardly a compelling narrative focus. But Lethem is a superb stylist (albeit in many different styles) and quickly one becomes absorbed in Sandy’s woozy worldview. The storyline is almost daft: after “the Arrest,” a global event that turns off nearly all technology, Sandy is comfortably numb in a rural Maine community that seems to be waiting for apocalypse, when his old movie producer buddy, an outre bullshit personality, arrives in a nuclear-powered digging machine. Throw in Sandy’s sister who once was ambiguously involved with the buddy, and the plot aches with foreboding but also crackles with Sandy’s life journey. Part dystopia, part satire, part examination of love and friendship, The Arrest is an odd fish novel that compels, a memorable peek into a man’s heart and soul. Heartily recommended.

A most unlikely minor miracle. Spy the cover of a sharp-eyed but older woman emblazoned with a title of “Keep It Moving: Lessons for the Rest of Your Life” in a book shop, and you’d be forgiven for dismissing this as a lame How-To full of platitudes. Luckily, when I spotted this book, I was in the know, for I’d soaked up Twyla Tharp’s astringent, vital advice bible for writers and other creatives, The Creative Habit, back in 2006. Tharp is an iconic choreographer, so both her books come from the world of dance but her message in both books, which is that it’s all about hard work and discipline, transcend her world. Keep It Moving offers twelve robust chapters of advice from Tharp, pitched at my age and older (she is over 70), and each chapter includes a set of physical exercises (“Squirm,” “Jump for Joy,” “marking your day,” and so on) and each of these strikes me as valuable. The author evangelizes movement and attitude, cajoles, and preaches, all expressed in a vibrant, blunt, intelligent style. For someone like me in the target audience, Keep It Moving is one of the best exercise How-To books I’ve come across, and I heartily recommend it for all ages.

A titan amongst modern sci-fi authors, N. K. Jemisin channels Lovecraft with “The City We Became,” the first book in a trilogy concerning a hideous, tentacled, savagely humorous creature out to destroy the Big Apple. Five New Yorkers find themselves as avatars of different boroughs of New York, and are thrust into chaotic discovery and battle, none of them clear on why they are chosen or what they are capable of. The author masterfully embraces the diverse set of heroes, each so different, each brimming with modern challenges drawn straight from this week’s headlines. The complex plot rockets along, sometimes perhaps lacking a fully laid out storyline, and the creature-versus-kinda-superhero battles pulse with virtuosity. I felt the middle section sagged under the weight of too much world-building baggage, but the ending was solid and promises a dramatic second book. Unusual and arresting.